moz.net.nz

Went on the BikeFun full moon ride on Saturday night and had a blast. Rode down the Yarra trail by moonlight, stopping only for a major snack attack and the occasional photo.

I run Schwalbe Marathon Plus tyres on my commuter bike because I’m willing to pay for reliability. They’re 60% more expensive than regular Marathons and they have noticeably higher rolling resistance. The trade-off is that they’re nigh-on impossible to puncture.

This I managed to demonstrate… while I was explaining to someone that they’re cool I spun my rear wheel and managed to stick myself with a nail that was embedded in the tyre. Not puncturing the tube, just sticking through the tyre. And my hand, but whatever. When i was taking photos for this post I noticed that the head of the nail had been ground off on one side so it sat flush with the tyre. Must have been there for a while

Phuong has been supervising an egg incubator for weeks now, turn the eggs twice a day and fretting constantly. Sort of like a broody hen. Finally this weekend they’ve mostly hatched, so she has 20-odd chicks to look at for hours and hours. More are no doubt hatching even as we speak (and she’s missing it!)

Phuonglet and I have been talking about co-housing for a while as a solution to our desire to live communally but avoid the ongoing hassles with share housing. Co-housing (wikipedia) is an intentional community in an urban area that amounts to an arranged neighbourhood. Rather than buy a house or apartment and take your chances on what sort of neighbours you get, the idea is to “bulk buy” in one place with like-minded people. Most co-housing groups end up with an emphasis on owning the house you live in for the obvious reason that it takes money to set one up. Phuong lived in Stucco which is an exception in that sense.

At the sustainable living festival a while ago Phuong put her name down on a mailing list for the Urban Coup and they have finally got to the point of having public meetings and wider recruiting. So we’ve signed up, gone to meetings and paid a membership fee. The goal is to build an apartment block somewhere in inner Melbourne with lots of common space, open areas and some chooks. Hence the name. Anyway, moving right along, we’ve been to meetings. Meetings. Bah.

There are about twenty people so far, lots of couples and some kids so there’s only about ten or so dwellings at this stage, with a goal of twice that. The focus is sustainability, and one amusing thing in the meetings is that so much stuff that would normally be argued is just assumed. Green stuff, obviously, but also experience of explicit consensus decision-making, the need to cater for vegetarians, all the urban liberal stuff that makes life worth while. There’s also a bunch of blokes who want a men’s shed or something close (we have a woodworker and a few metalworkers including the inevitable SCAdian who wants a forge).

The interesting thing for me (aside from coming up with the cash in my parlous financial state) is how I’m feeling less knowledgeable than most of the others there. I’ve never owned residential property before, let alone built one, and the whole formal organisation is an area I’ve tried hard to avoid to date. I did mention the A-word and no-one threw up, so that’s good, but it means I’m operating out of my comfort zone. We need lots of state involvement to build something like this. Urk. Still, the coup has its share of bureaucrats and managers so we should be right.

As part of my quiet campaign to reform the spelling of “Melbourne” I regularly use the correct spelling when searching. Today’s surprise was that google returns the BOM as the first hit for “melbun whether”

Charles Stross has a go at the American empire over their treatment of prisoners and attitude to the rest of the world. I don’t normally post links here but this one hit me because he doesn’t normally rant about politics.

“I’ve been suppressing the urge to explode angrily ever since Thursday, when Abdelbaset Al Megrahi was officially released from prison and flown home to Libya. His release — on compassionate grounds … What bugs me is the complete lack of comprehension of the quality of mercy that seems to have crept over the US political class this century. … the justice system isn’t solely about punishment. It’s about respect for the greater good of society, which is better served by rehabilitation and reconciliation than by revenge. We do not make ourselves better people by exercising a gruesome revenge on the bodies of our vanquished foes”

I’ve been playing with a pedal powered water pump for a while now, I bought a drill pump months ago and have finally got round to actually building it. It’s undergeared at the moment, I can pedal using one hand but I’ve got plans to fix that problem. For the same reason it’s a bit slow, about 8-10 litres/minute but on the other hand it’s not very hard work (not even slightly) so I’ve been testing it by sitting on it reading my book wearing headphones… it’s all good. Full write-up here

While I’m playing with blog tools and uploading photos it seems like a good idea to see how easy it is to embed images from my new gallery in posts. Since that’s what I will be doing a lot of.

So, on the left is our post-xmas exercise ride around a couple of local bike paths. Up the Moonee Creek path, down the Merri Creek one. On the right is the November Critical Mass ride in Melbourne.

Then across the bottom is a pile of random images from other things I’ve done recently. Movember,

OK, I still have to go through all the imported blog posts and fix the images and links, but in the mean time I’ve been dumping photos into a gallery for your amusement. Eventually I might even work out how to make posts that appear in the past so I can add random writing and events from history. Eventually perhaps even including everything from my old site (which will stay up, it gets too many hits to make removing it easy).

Gallery Here

So it’s been a semi-work holiday day editing and arranging photos. Have a look, let me know what you think. Thoughts about the blog would also be appreciated.

{update} Gallery is a bit ugly to work with, and the auto-installed version from my host is not making that easier. So April sees me starting again, again, and trying something different. Wait for it… sorry.

For the few days before Christmas our postie wore a Santa costume. It was very cool, but hard to take photos of someone who zooms round that fast.

I’m moving to a blog for content management because doing it all manually is too much work. Hopefully this means I’ll update the site more often. But for a while there will be hiccups as I play with things.

Today was another time I’m glad to own the quad. Since last posting Ben (TriSled) has added a Rohloff and two wheel drive. And 5kg I reckon, it’s up to about 33kg without bin now. But it is excellent to ride now, traction is noticably improved and the Rohloff… is a Rohloff. So nice. I have a 30/50-ish double chainring on it which has a shifter but is pretty much loaded/unloaded gearing. Tyhe hub is geared down about 2:3 before the rear axle so gearing is pretty low. I could put a smaller chainring on (triple) to get decent gears for really steep hills when I’m loaded but I might wait until the warranty on the Rohloff expires.

Here’s me weighing the beastie: (Click for large)

Total about 200kg of load. Felt quite good to ride (the garden shop is a long, gentle uphill from here so coming back is mostly a matter of occasional pedallingto get up slight rises in and overall downhill trend. I still managed to get a bit sweaty though.

More photos on moz.net.nz (Bibble is giving me the shits so I’ve just deleted the index file and left you to it)

My local bike shop have an annual party in the park with food and entertainment laid on. Pics and stuff on my site. I’m slightly sunburnt and very full of excellent food. Check out the photos…

I’ve finally found a flat where I can actually build bikes. We have a single garage about 8m long by 3m wide with brick walls and no close residents. So I’ve started by installing 10 hooks along one wall to hang bikes on (and all the hooks are full, but we still have bikes left over). Between me (three bikes hanging, two not), Phuong (three bikes hanging) and Mitchell (four bikes hanging). Unfortunately that uses about 5m of wall and there’s not much left for the quad and binbike (each about 2m long).

So I’ve bought a TIG welder and built a 2m long workbench that will eventually have a lockable shelf for the welder and tools, but right now just has a vice on it. This week I will hopefully get the shelf and drawers installed, and another shelf up in the garage to hold more of the stuff we seem to have accumulated.

I’ll probably blog more about it, but mostly just update the page at Mozbike where I will describe the stuff I use to build the bikes you see here. You don’t need lots of expensive tools, people like Alex have almost everything you need in a much smaller space and much lower cost, but I’ve been there and done that, and now I want something a little better. At Ken’s place I built One Less Ute in a space exactly 5cm shorter than the frame, with no flat surfaces. It was not fun. Designing bikes to fit around the workshop is a bit of an avoidable limitation. So since it’s my workshop, the bench is two metres long and there’s a decent vice bolted to one end, and a nearly decent vice bolted to the other end. And I have a TIG welder. But I’m going to have to sell half the tools I got off Megan, having two circular saws, two power drills and a router is a bit much.

More details on moz.geek.nz

I’ve destroyed two 8 speed Shitmano nexus hubs so far, they each lasted about 5000km before failing. I’ve decided they are just not designed for people like me. So I’ve got a third one in my commuter (a 26″ wheel On-One “Inbred” singlespeed frame). I’m pretty happy with the bike except for the hub, but putting a proper hub into it would be quite tricky, and I’d have to buy another one (about $2000).

So instead I will spend way more than $2000 on a TIG welder, tools and tubing to build my own. I told you I was a really smart guy!

My plan at this stage is to put my 20″ wheel Rohloff into a forth bike, this time a fairly lightweight commuting frame. Possibly even a frame that breaks in the middle so it packs smaller for transport. If the bike works I’ll build one for Phuong too, as her existing 24″ wheel MTB is somewhat on the heavy side for someone who only weighs 50kg or so.

But first there’s tools to acquire, workshop to arrange, and bits to buy.

I just got email from an italian called Rocco who was inspired by www.mozbike.com to create his own version of One Less Ute. it’s very cool, and I like hearing from people that have done stuff like this with my help.

That’s currently hosted on a site, www.piubici.org that promoted cycling in Milan which he’s helped to set up. In Italian, for those who read that language. There’s cool pictures for the rest of us.

I’ve been thinking about a replacement for MegaTrailer for a while now. MegaTrailer is big and old, and I’ve donated it to Bike Club. Basically, I’m trying to justify spending big bucks on a TIG welder and this is yet another project that will use it

Simple design, easy enough to execute, and should work quite well. I’ve got a proper write-up page on MozBike

Today was a little busy, I had megatrailer on the quad and was biking around the place for a couple of hours. Phuong went to a fan-dancing lesson and found a somewhat overstuffed couch and reclining armchair so we traded up. It’s definitely better than our old couch (also found on the side of the road), which we put out the front and then neighbours in unit one grabbed it.

After our usual lunch at the Addison Road Organic markets (thanks Paul and Fiona) we rode off most of the way to work to pick up a single bed that Phuong found on Freecycle Sydney. That was not huge fun, Old Pyrmont Bridge road is pretty busy and there’s not a lot of spare road space for moronists to go round me safely on the uphills. On the way back we found a queen size mattress so that got piled that on top. Then in Enmore we got a couch-frame for Phuong’s futon base but luckily for me that turned out to be a lightweight steel frame rather than the big heavy wooden one that Kelly had. So, now we have a lounge organised. Yippee

As part of my ongoing (destructive) testing of the Trisled load-carrying quad I’ve been using it during our latest house move. Most of the work was done with a hired van, but we had a heap of stuff that wouldn’t fit in the one trip, and I was keen to move by bike as much as possible. So I’ve been dragging stuff the couple of kilometres between flats (downhill, uphill, down, up, down then steep but short uphill… longest flat section is about 300m). Mostly I’ve been using BinBike because I’m riding that to work every day. That will carry most things, including Phuong’s desk (1.2m long, tied to the rear rack) and it tows megatrailer for the ugly bits (my shelves which are 2.6m long). Of course, we destroyed another wheel doing that because megatrailer has cheap, trashed wheels from found BMX bikes on it.

But I’ve been using the quad for a few things. We got a washing machine the other day, so I took the bin off and put a bit of plywood in place, then rode off the get the machine. It turned out to be one of the new lightweight ones so that was no real hassle, but it attracted a certain amount of attention. Plus the weather has responded to our move by raining with some enthusiasm, so I’ve been using the bins to keep stuff dry as I move it.

This weekend I will be taking it apart and shipping the rear end back to Ben for a com plete rebuild, he’s putting a Rohloff in it and hopefully two wheel drive. That should solve most of the current problems, so I can work on finding new ones

I was reminded today of my early load bikes based on the Long John design. There’s now an online archive of the original designs at www.longjohn.org. My ones were of course a bit more agricultural looking, but they worked pretty well I think. The prototype worked but the steering sucked a bit, there’s subtleties in the pushrod steering that take a bit of working through. I started with the simple, obvious style everyone else uses but couldn’t get enough steering movement to make me happy. After a bit of faffing I ended up with the thing shown that worked better but still not very well.

The final version was called “one less ute”, was made from chrome moly steel and was very light for its carrying capacity - around 20kg of bike could carry over 100kg of load despite the bike being nearly 3m long. The commercial bikes tend to be heavier than that, carry less, and have a much smaller load platform - mine was 1.5m long by 600mm wide. Plus the load platform folded upwards making the bike very narrow when folded, so I could park it in a hallway.